There’s Work to be Done. (How Are We Defining the Word, “Work”?)

7 minute read

Recently, someone sent an article to me with the title “What’s a Death Doula? Growing profession brings peace, plans at the end of life.” It fills me with purposeful hope to see articles like this one available for the public to read. The general public deserves to know about the beautiful Holistic Death Care Movement, as I’m calling it, that is growing up among it. Holistic Death Care Workers (Doulas/Midwives/Companions) need articles like the once mentioned above to help hold their work up.

However, as a Death Midwifery mentor, I do cringe when I read the words “Death Doula / growing profession.” In my experience, phrasing such as this can lead prospective Holistic Death Care Workers to think that there are going to very possibly be many families calling them to be their Death Doula once they complete a Holistic Death Care Worker training program. I am very transparent with my apprentices, and mentees who come to me outside of the Nine Keys Death Midwifery Apprenticeship, when I say, “This work is not a trained/graduated/applied/hired situation. Barely anybody knows they need you. We learn dying and death care in real time in this country and nine times out of ten, that’s too late to be searching for a Death Doula.”

I know these things because I’ve been doing the work officially for eight years, loosely for almost ten. I’ve watched the swelling tides of Holistic Death Care Workers coming into this calling.

It is obvious to me that my Death Midwifery work with families in Atlanta and nationwide grew so quickly because I was a part of a large yoga community. I remind my apprentices of this often. My yoga classes grew to seventy-five attendees at the height of my yoga teaching career. I was a contributing writer for the online publication that belongs to this particular yoga organization. The readers are worldwide.  I knew a lot of people. A lot of people knew me. I’ve taught hundreds of people through my death education classes in Atlanta. Word spread quickly about my Death Midwifery. I’m a been-there-done-that Death Midwife. In 2017, I spent six months as a steward for a green burial cemetery where I met families who use my services and a funeral director who still sometimes refers families to me. I created the Death Midwifery Journey Course that year and mentored individuals in my yoga community who reached out to me for Death Midwifery training. That course eventually transformed into the Nine Keys Death Midwifery apprenticeship.  Through these programs I have walked intimately with almost one hundred death workers, not hundreds. As I mentioned earlier, I also mentor many other Holistic Death Care Workers as they figure out the ropes of this budding ‘profession’ that barely anyone is hiring them for.

I am not aware of a death worker going through a ‘Death Doula’ training program and finishing it to then find themselves knee deep in death work. What I find are Holistic Death Care Workers who go through quick training programs, unaware of the steep reality that their work is going to take some entrepreneurial elbow grease. I’ve watched this for the past several years. They leave the program, set up a website, maybe some social media pages, some may volunteer for hospice, then they get discouraged and move on to something else.

I’m acutely aware of the financial limits on Holistic Death Care Workers who can’t quit their day jobs to focus on building their death care practice full time. I think people forget that I essentially have four jobs and that I’m trying to make ends meet as a recent divorcee with no family financial support.

I’m an Intuitive Counselor with a growing practice, a Numinous Communicator with a slow but steady trickling-in of clients in Atlanta, a Death Midwife myself, and a Death Midwifery ‘trainer.’ (Though, I prefer the phrasing “Death Midwifery Auntie.”)

While the general public isn’t coming in mass sweeps banging down the doors of Holistic Death Care Workers’ businesses, thousands of individuals ARE being called to step into the role of holistic death care worker. Why is that? Death Midwifery isn’t a fad job, a flash in the pan trend, it’s a dire need and Holistic Death Care Workers know it.

As the bard Stephen Jenkinson puts it in his book Die Wise, we are living in a ‘death-phobic’ society. We live in a society where someone with terminal illness is referred to as a ‘fighter’ until they are ‘losing their battle’, and if we accept their fate, we’re ‘giving up on them.’  We live in a society that grew up thinking that when it came time for their loved one to die that the local hospice was going to step in and take care of all of the death and dying needs. This false advertising leaves caregivers with fatigued adrenals and not many places to put their grief but stuffed down into their stomachs and it leaves nurses who are under great strain. I know, I see it.

We don’t know our funeral and burial options in this country, but we know a GoFundMe is usually employed to take care of the options we do know of. We same-ole-same-ole the whole end-of-life narrative because we, raised to deny limits, the American way, just don’t give serious thought to our dying until it’s sitting next to us. Even then, some refuse to look at it. We don’t know what to do with a mother whose newborn died while being born. We don’t know what to do with the family whose son shot his wife. We sure as hell don’t know what to do with the opioid crisis and the unprocessed grief that’s causing it. We don’t know what to do with grief here.

We don’t know what to do with death and grief because neither of those work well for a hustling consumerist society that touts that we are limitless and can work more more more. We hide death and grief away; we outsource their care.

So, if you ask me, all of these Holistic Death Care Workers coming up right now are educators. They are Death Educating their communities, they are Death Educating their clients and they are Death Educating anyone who will listen. As I say to my apprentices, “The byproduct of Death Education is marketing. When you hold the Death Café or you create a Grief Group at your local yoga studio, you are giving your community so much opportunity for healing and empowerment, but you are also letting your community know where to find you.”  Hospice is ‘hiring’ Death Doulas as volunteers. Volunteers are the lowest paid employees in death care. This arrangement isn’t sustainable.

Hospitals don’t want anything to do with us (yet). Have you ever heard of a funeral home with a Death Midwife on staff? Yeah, me neither. Recently I heard, the story of a mother who called the funeral home to ask what time her son’s cremation would be. The funeral director told her, “It’s on my list of things to do today.” That’s death industry speak. That’s not death care. A Death Midwife on that funeral director’s staff would keep the heart of the business steady when he’s overwhelmed, as most funeral directors are.

Holistic Death Care Workers get into these remarkable death worker communities and often fail to remember that they’re sitting in an echo chamber. They’re talking about Holistic Death Care Work to holistic death workers. Often their work is stunted by comparison or a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen worry. They don’t fully understand that there is room for them, and more than this, they are needed. If we ask Holistic Death Care workers to go to their neighbors’ houses and ask them if they know about the importance of Holistic Death Care workers, they’ll find that barely anyone knows what a Holistic Death Care worker is. In Los Angeles, California or Portland, Oregon you’ll find more folks may know about Holistic Death Care workers, but in Indianapolis, Indiana or Atlanta, Georgia, the neighbors are clueless.

One could ask me, and one has asked me, “What are you doing training Death Midwives when the work isn’t out there for them when they leave your apprenticeship?” And my answer will have to be a question, “How are we defining the word ‘work?’ “ Once you start to peel back the reality of our current death industry options, you begin to find there is much work to be done. If you peel it back too far, you may become overwhelmed by the need for Holistic Death Care workers.

I have great expectations for the Holistic Death Care Movement. Some may say I have pipedreams, but I’d be safe to say those who say such things haven’t seen what I’ve seen.  There is going to come a day when people won’t ask us, “What’s a Death Midwife? I’ve never heard of that.” There is going to come a day when the caregiver of a dying person has enough support. There is going to come a day when the after-loss process isn’t rushed out the door to the funeral home. There is going to come a day when those who struggle with suicidal ideations are not only medicated and hospitalized but rather held by their community. There is going to come a day when the general public knows that expressions of grief support go far beyond the first few weeks after loss and that there is a difference between grief and depression.

There is going to come a day when hospitals have deep and holistic support for bereaved parents AND their hospital staff. There is going to come a day when every single person in this country knows all of their death care, funeral and burial options. There is going to come a day when knowing the importance of getting your end-of-life affairs in order will be common knowledge. On that day, a great healing will happen. It most likely won’t be a day that I see, but that day will come. In the meantime, education is the Holistic Death Care worker’s job and my job is to educate Holistic Death Care workers.